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Colliders help scientists study particle physics, which has been essential in breaking barriers in theoretical research in atomic and quantum physics. The argument goes that if we could build a bigger accelerator, which is a huge (miles in circumference or length) gun for firing particles and studying how they behave when they collide, we could find answers to questions as essential as "Are there smaller elements than those that make up quarks?" And "is there a unified theory that actually makes sense?" And "What happened at the beginning of the universe?" Of course these all have weapons applications!

So who's leading the world in colliders? It looks like America is losing its former leadership, and Europe is taking over. Now we read that India is developing its own equipment.

What are we doing about it?

Mostly Republicans killed our super collider project in 1993. As "vanesch" in that link said:

The Killing of the Superconducting Supercollider

The Democrats are generally seen as pro-science, who want to shell in big bucks for research. And of coure, superconducting supercollider has little to do with defeating communism at this point so I'd expect the Republicans to vote against it. Still... I'm soo confused...

I think the killing of the SSC was somehow sad but justified. The management of the project went completely wrong, and if I remember well, it had already spend 4 times the initial planned budget when it was 1/4 through the project. Even though I'm a particle physicist, and even though I think that the SSC was a great idea which was sad to close down, I can fully understand that when a project is approved, and it is slowly turning out that it will cost about 20 times more than initially proposed, you get the door on your nose.

Notice that Amdt. 983 to H.R. 2445 (Energy and Water Development Appropriations Act, 1994) kills the super-collider project.

Now notice who voted against it in the greatest numbers: Republicans.

Peter Woit, a Mathematics prof at Columbia, writes:

The only plan on the table for the US to get back into the high energy accelerator business is the International Linear Collider (ILC), but the question of how such a machine would be financed, and whether it would even be constructed in the US at all, remains up in the air. In a very real sense, the future of experimental high energy physics in the US after 2010 is a very large question mark.

He's reacting to this article which I found summarized:

Monday, 7 February, was a grim day for the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). "You wake up, you go to a presentation, and you find out you're dead," says Fermilab physicist Joel Butler. Butler is co-spokesperson of an experiment known as BTeV--a multimillion-dollar project that would allow scientists to study the properties of the bottom quark. But that Monday, when the new Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman took to the podium to announce the department's budget request for 2006, BTeV scientists were horrified to discover that their project had been canceled. -- High-Energy Physics: Exit America?

Leadership in science requires commitment and determination. We had it in the mid-20th century. It looks like we're losing it to me, and I don't see Republicans stepping up to the challenge of reversing the trend.

So far, Republican leadership in physics and space exploration has been weak. I was optimistic about it after President Bush's early speeches after taking office, but where are the results?

So far, Republican leadership in physics and space exploration has been weak.

Forget leadership in physics. With the way things are going we will be lucky to get classes that teach Darwin. Bigotry from the Christian Right is one of the biggest threats facing science today!!!

NASA has -- or had -- a program for doing basic research into advanced propulsion systems. Such research will take us into the future. But funding's just about dried up.

The people in the Physics Forum list have it backwards. A "Yea" vote was against the Bumpers amendment to kill the SSC, and the Republicans (led by Phil Gramm, the SSC's biggest cheerleader) were overwhelmingly for it. The few Repubs who did vote against Nay it were RINOs like Jeffords. The Dems who voted yea-Feinstein, Leiberman, Bennett Johnston-are well known for their strong support of pro-science policy, regardless of who sponsors it. Such supposedly "pro-science" Dems as Kerry, Kennedy and Wellstone voted against tabling the Bumpers amendment for no good reason other than blind partisanship, although Mark Warner probably voted Nay so that the Jefferson lab, which was his own baby, would get more funding.